


The Monster Under the Bed

by Solarcat



Series: Family-verse [4]
Category: Fantastic Four (Ultimateverse), Spider-Man (Ultimateverse)
Genre: Future Fic, Kid Fic, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-29
Updated: 2007-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-07 22:29:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solarcat/pseuds/Solarcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Papa, there's a monster under my bed!" May looked up at him with large, earnest eyes.</p><p>Peter woke Johnny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Monster Under the Bed

"Papa! Papa, wake up!" Peter awakened to a quiet, panicked voice and a pair of small hands tugging at the short sleeve of his t-shirt.

"Hm?" He murmured, still mostly asleep. A glance at the alarm clock on his nightstand revealed that it was not yet 4am. Peter groaned.

"Papa!" The voice urged again, and Peter shifted to look at his daughter, who was kneeling on the edge of his and Johnny's bed.

"May? What are you doing awake, honey?" He spoke quietly as he sat up a little, doing his best not to wake Johnny, who was still snoring lightly next to him. Reassured that her Papa was now awake, May threw herself into his arms. Startled, Peter embraced her, wondering what was going on. May hadn't, so far in her young life, been one for nightmares and the like; she had always been a sound sleeper, and Peter could count on one hand the number of times she had awakened him or Johnny in the middle of the night like this. He cuddled her for a moment, gently stroking her back with a calming hand.

Finally, the answer was forthcoming -

"Papa, there's a monster under my bed!" May looked up at him with large, earnest eyes.

Peter woke Johnny.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"I think we are the only family in history where things like this are taken seriously." Johnny complained, holding his daughter on one flannel-clad hip. Peter rolled his eyes and continued examining the space under May's bed with Reed's universal scanner. If there were anything there - whether it be invisible, a bleed-through from a parallel dimension, or pretty much anything else that could be conceived of - it would be found. May sucked a thumb nervously, clinging to Johnny's side as she waited for her fathers to make everything fine again.

Despite their supposed "seriousness", Peter didn't really expect to find anything. Still, this _was_ the Baxter Building, and as such was one of the few places Peter could think of off-hand where a "monster under the bed" could, in fact, show up. So, he had given charge of May over to Johnny, and run down to the lab to pick up the scanner. It was better to be safe than sorry. He was mechanically moving the scanner back and forth, most of his brain already back in his comfortable, warm bed, when there was a *beep!* from the handset. Peter jumped a little, and heard a sharp gasp from May. Johnny took a step back.

"What was that?" He asked nervously, clutching May a little tighter. Monsters? Okay, he could handle monsters. But not, under any circumstances, while holding his three-year-old.

"I don't know." Peter pressed a few buttons on the scanner, frowning as a few of the lights changed colors. The green line on the screen spiked oddly, then turned orange.

Peter and Johnny woke Reed and Sue.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"So what is it?" Peter asked, lounging against the doorframe of May's room. May herself was dozing lightly in Johnny's arms, the excitement not enough to keep her from succumbing to the early hour.

Reed was absorbed in his work, one arm stretched to scan under the bed - much the way Peter had been doing earlier but without the relatively undignified positioning - and the other hand typing away at the portable computer console that had been brought into the room. It was Sue, who was likewise working on a console, but had always been much better at paying attention to things _other_ than what she was working on, who answered.

"It's a portal." She adjusted something on the sensors, then stepped over to the door to talk. "A bit like the portals we make to access the N-Zone, or other dimensions. Except this one seems to have developed spontaneously or been created on the other side, and we can't quite tell where it goes, yet."

"Can you tell if anything came _through_ it?" Johnny was getting impatient. This seemed to be taking forever, and there was nothing he could _do_.

"It's hard to say. If we can get a fix on the other side of the tear, we might be able to tell, but right now we're forced to scan for anything and _everything_ that could have possibly fallen through - or come through intentionally." Sue sighed. "The computers are fast, but not _that_ fast, and it's not as if we've found every possible dimension and every possible species to ever exist anywhere. It would be impossible. So we may be scanning for something we've never even seen before."

"And there's nothing that says it has to be organic." Peter mused. "It could be mechanical. Maybe someone in another dimension, sending probes through the way you do?"

Sue suddenly stood straighter and quickly made her way back to the console, directing the computers to scan the Baxter Building for any foreign technology. "Good thinking." She grinned at Peter, and he grinned back. His academic specialty may have been the biological sciences rather than the sort of high-level quantum physics that Reed and Sue dabbled in, but he had always been skilled at thinking on his feet.

"So shouldn't we be searching the building or something?" Johnny questioned pointedly, "If we've got something running around here, shouldn't we be checking on Franklin?"

"Or Ben?" Peter added, at which Johnny sniffed.

"I'd like to see it _try_ to take a bite out of Ben."

"We don't even know what 'it' _is_." Sue noted absently as she speed-read the scan results that were scrolling across the screen in front of her.

"I'd still like to see it try." Johnny shot back with a grin.

"This doesn't make any sense!" Reed muttered suddenly, and every head in the room turned to look at him. He glanced up, then blinked owlishly, as if surprised to find he was suddenly the center of attention. "What?"

Sue smiled fondly. "_What_ doesn't make sense, dear?"

Reed blinked again. "Oh. Right. This portal - it's tiny, for one thing. And for another, I can't trace it. The system just keeps giving me our coordinates. Or close enough, anyway. I think it needs to be recalibrated. It's trying to tell me that the other end of this thing is on East 59th Street." He scratched his head and shifted his glasses on his nose. "Like I said. It makes no sense whatsoever."

Johnny raised an eyebrow. "East 59th Street? Seriously? Why would anyone bother to open a portal between 59th street and here? It'd be cheaper to take a cab."

Peter and Sue chuckled, though Reed just looked a bit confused.

"Wait- yes!" Sue scrambled as something on her monitor made a computerized pinging noise. "I've got a lock on the energy signature of the tear. It's... That's odd." She typed in a few more commands, checking to see that the reading was correct. "It's ours."

"Ours?" Three voices echoed simultaneously.

"Yes. 'Ours'. As in, our rift manipulator. The one in Lab Six."

"And it opened a portal between East 59th and _our daughter's bedroom_?" Johnny demanded, his face darkening. Peter murmured his agreement with the sentiment, even as Johnny's mind filled with visions of the damage a good, solid hammer could do to the stupid machine.

"That seems to be the case." Sue was completely flummoxed. There was just _no way_ that the machine could have done such a thing on its own. It had no AI components, and needed to be manually controlled. Reed had been working on a remote control system to give them a bit more flexibility to experiment, but it was nowhere near complete - it hadn't even been assembled yet.

"That's not possible." Reed said confidently, though the instant after he said it, he forced himself to wonder. _Was_ it possible? The machine could have malfunctioned. A power surge of some kind could have caused it to activate - the portal _was_ small, and the short geographic distance between the two end points implied that it hadn't taken much power (relatively speaking) to produce.

There was a thudding noise in the hallway, and everyone turned to look as Ben Grimm filled the doorway. "What's all the commotion about?" His voice was more gravelly than usual, probably due to the fact that it was quarter to five in the morning.

"There was a monster under May's bed." Johnny answered, keeping a remarkably straight face. Ben raised what passed for an eyebrow, looking the room over. Reed and Sue's equipment sat there, blinking and humming and doing what it did.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah." Peter replied. "We scanned, found a portal. We were trying to figure out what, if anything, came through it, and where it came _from_, but Reed just figured that part out." Ben held up one of his large hands, stopping the explanation.

"Lemme guess. 59th Street?"

That caught even Reed's attention, and all motion in the room stopped as all four of the adults in the room stared at Ben.

"How did _you_ know?" Sue asked, bewildered. With a rumbling sigh, Ben brought his other hand up, revealing its contents. A tiny orange and white kitten was curled up in his palm, half-blending with Ben's unusual coloring. It blinked as it noticed its new surroundings, sitting up to cast a curious gaze over the room.

"Mrow." The kitten mewed at them, then settled back into Ben's hand and began grooming its paws.

"Kitty!" May, who had roused a bit when Ben entered the room, was now fully awake and staring in wonderment at the small animal.

The temporary collar around its neck read "E. 59th St. Humane Society".

"It woke me up." Ben explained simply.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Once the equipment had been removed, they managed to get May back into bed with the promise that she could keep the kitten with her. She fell back to sleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, a contented smile upon her face. Peaches, as he had been quickly named, was curled up on the bedspread, the tip of his tail a twitching white dot against the purple quilt.

"She named it." Johnny whispered to Peter as they stood in the doorway, watching the little girl and the cat sleep.

"Mm-hmm." Peter agreed, resting his head against Johnny's shoulder.

"We can't give it back to the Humane Society now. She'd hate us forever." He sounded resigned, but Peter caught the faint trace of amusement in his voice.

"Mm-hmm." He agreed again. "We can call them in the morning. Get it all straightened out."

"Yeah." Johnny nodded, then wrapped his arm around Peter's waist and squeezed him lightly. "Let's go back to bed." They did so, shifting around and getting comfortable, then let the silence of the morning settle over the room.

"I know Reed sealed it, but I wonder how that tear got there in the first place. Reed was right - that machine shouldn't have been able to create a portal on its own."

Johnny sighed into his hair. "It malfunctioned. Reed'll fix it. Go to sleep." He laid a sloppy kiss on Peter's temple and proceeded to follow his own advice.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

They never did figure out exactly what had happened; how the tear had been created in the first place. Reed had gone over the rift manipulator a dozen times, and could never find anything to indicate a malfunction or power surge. Nonetheless, he went to lengths to ensure that such a malfunction could not happen again, installing fail-safes and bioscan safeguards.

Somehow, no one ever noticed the smug looks that occasionally crossed Franklin Richards' face when he watched his younger cousin play with her cat.


End file.
